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Dr Roger Smith
Curator: Karoo
Palaeontology Collections
Natural History Department
Iziko South African Museum
Box 61, Cape Town 8000
South Africa
Phone: +27 (0)21 481 3879
Fax: +27 (0)21 481 3993
e-mail: rsmith@iziko.org.za Roger Smith was born in Cambridge, England and came to South
Africa in 1976 after graduating in Geology and Zoology from
Manchester University. He spent the first 3 years employed by the
Geological Survey in Pretoria working on biostratigraphy of
uranium-bearing rocks in the southern Karoo. This work was submitted
to BPI Palaeontology at Wits University for MSc in 1982. In 1983,
After 4 years running a diamond exploration project for Newmont
mining in the Western Transvaal, he joined the South African Museum
in Cape Town to continue his research on the Karoo rocks and fossils
and gained a doctorate through the Geology department at UCT in
1989. For the past 22 years he has been a research scientist/curator in the Karoo Palaeontology Department of SA Museum, working
on various NRF funded projects under the general title of
“Palaeoecology of Gondwana”. Highlights of his career have been in
discovering several fossils that are new to science (one of which is
called Stompooria rogersmithi), and new evidence for the way
the ancient therapsids lived such as underground burrows with nests
of juveniles, and footprint surfaces showing herding behaviour, and
fossilized droppings with “crunched” bones inside.
Over the past 5 years Roger has participated in
several collaborative research ventures to Eritrea, Niger, Lesotho,
Namibia, Madagascar and Antarctica, mostly funded by the American
National Science Foundation and the National Geographical Society.
This has allowed him to extend the search area for Karoo fossil faunas
out of the Karoo basin and into the peripheral rift valleys. These
studies are ongoing with Zambia and Tanzania the next targets.
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